When monitoring pages that adjust their content based on the user's operating system, like those displaying OS-specific downloads or drivers, you might encounter challenges. Some sites perform OS detection and require interaction to display the desired information. Here's how you can effectively monitor such pages using PageCrawl.io.

Two Approaches to Handle OS Detection

There are two main ways to handle pages that require OS selection:

1. Set a Custom User Agent

You can configure PageCrawl to use a specific User Agent string that mimics a Windows browser. This approach is simple and works for most basic OS detection scenarios.

How to set it up:

• Navigate to your page's Advanced Preferences
• Set the User Agent to a Windows 10/11 browser string, for example:

  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.5735.199 Safari/537.36

Advantages:

• Quick and easy to implement
• Works reliably for basic OS detection
• No complex configuration required

Limitations:

• Cannot distinguish between Windows 10 and Windows 11
• May not work with sophisticated detection methods
• Limited control over specific OS version selection
• Older User Agent versions may be blocked by security/bot detection tools used by websites

2. Use Actions to Interact with OS Selection Forms

For pages with dropdown menus or forms where you need to select a specific OS version, you can use PageCrawl's Actions feature to automate the selection process.

How to set it up:

1. Navigate to your page's Actions settings
2. Create click actions on the appropriate selectors
3. Configure the sequence to:
   • Click on the OS dropdown/selector
   • Select your specific OS version
   • Submit the form if required

Example scenario: If a driver download page has a form with OS selection dropdown, you can:

1. Add an action to click on the OS dropdown selector
2. Add an action to click on "Windows 11" option
3. Add an action to click the submit button

Advantages:

• Precise control over OS version selection
• Can handle complex multi-step forms
• Works with any type of OS selection interface

Limitations:

• More complex to set up initially
• May need adjustments if the page structure changes
• Requires identifying the correct CSS selectors

Which Method Should You Choose?

• Use the User Agent method if:

  • The site only needs basic OS detection
  • You don't need to distinguish between specific OS versions
  • You want a quick, maintenance-free solution

• Use the Actions method if:

  • You need to select a specific OS version (e.g., Windows 11 vs Windows 10)
  • The page has a form or dropdown for OS selection
  • The User Agent method doesn't work for your specific page